“Hey,” she heard Nolan’s voice, even more raspy after he woke in the mornings. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Quinn said and she saw his eyes pause on her hand resting on her aching stomach. “I feel pregnant,” she heard herself say. It was as if another woman had spoken those words. Quinn didn’t understand what made her say that, a comment so unnecessary and uncalled for. No one had pushed her, no one had made her say it, yet she had spoken words that were so far from the truth. She’d just given Nolan, her husband of less than thirty days, the impression she might be with child. Was it because when they were together, all she did was imagine Nolan’s sperm burrowing itself into her egg? She had imagined the egg dividing into cells, moving into her uterus, attaching itself—implantation, it was called. Such a crude word for a miracle. She’d left out the part of the fertilized egg traveling down the fallopian tubes because they were blocked and the doctor had told her in so many words that she may never have a baby of her own. Difficulties, conception problems—that’s what they had told her. As if she could forget. She knew what the doctors had said, they had spoken of scar tissue, and she imagined those scars like welts on skin, and why not, why would her body not display what she felt on the inside—scarred she was—but just like she had reinvented herself, she also wanted to conjure a healthy body. I feel pregnant, she had said. She had gotten carried away, a small mistake on her part, nothing more.
Quinn felt bloated, full; something inside her was gnawing at her, had been gnawing for days. She felt it growing inside of her, the feeling at times so uncomfortable that she’d propped up a pillow and rested her stomach on it with her body facedown, pressed hard against it, and she’d allow the weight of her body to push against this feeling of fullness. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel, didn’t know what to do, maybe she ought to call Sigrid and ask her. She knew she wasn’t pregnant, just knew, couldn’t explain it, but she knew with certainty. She felt as if a cannonball was lodged inside of her, and that was the best she could describe it.
Nolan rose and hugged her. He held her for a long time and then he let go of her and she heard the toilet flush shortly thereafter. Quinn was unable to move, she felt paralyzed, her legs no longer under her control. Her mind began to spark erratically. A voice in her head spoke. Why? it said. Why did you just say that? And she stood by the window and watched a golden-bronze hare emerge from the knee-high grass. First it moved slowly, and then it lolloped in an ungainly way. Suddenly the wind picked up and somewhere a shutter slammed and the hare went up on her hind legs, black eyes staring seemingly in every direction.
After breakfast Quinn stepped on the porch and watched Nolan retrieve the rest of their suitcases from the trunk of the car. His movements were unwavering despite his limp and Quinn wondered if anything could ever throw him off. She had noticed how his gray eyes never traveled down her body, but were always focused on her eyes, as if he saw something in them only he could fathom. Maybe his adoring nature led him to be captivated by her, always in thought, always observing her, but it was hard to read him in return. Nolan then made a gesture of recognition, raised his right hand, pointing behind her, past the house.
“We just missed them,” he called out.
“Who?” Quinn asked.
“The buttercups. They were in full bloom a few weeks back. I guess we have to wait until next spring. Do you want to go for a walk in the woods?”
His words made her jerk. Lately, after all those moments, after she thought she had conquered the past, that day in the woods had become more and more consuming. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know she had no fault in this, she was not to blame, no one is to blame for being raped, but it was her lot of having to live in this body, day in and day out, knowing what had been done to it. That’s why no baby was going to grow inside of her—her body wasn’t worth it. Having a husband who knew nothing of what had been done to the body he held every night, the violation of it all, the knowledge she could never escape, for this was the only body she had been given and she’d have to take it to her grave one day, was unbearable at times.
And every day she encountered new moments that made her think just how tainted she really was. The way the man at the Corpus Christi gas station had pointed at the dead dog in the bed of his pickup truck, a head wound seeping crimson, and how his calloused hands had wiped tears off his cheeks, not the least embarrassed about his feelings. He’d told Nolan right there among the gas fumes that the dog had killed one of the chickens it was supposed to protect and he wasn’t good anymore. He had to shoot it, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, a dog that had tasted blood wasn’t good for anything anymore, but he’d loved that dog. He was a good dog, best one I ever had, but he couldn’t stand for the fact that the dog had killed, He clamped his teeth shut and shook that chicken, swinging it, and that you can never erase from a mind. All the love in the world couldn’t make up for one’s actions.
There was the roadside diner in Conroe, and the two siblings, a boy and a girl, who argued over an ice-cream cone, and the boy declared, Now that you licked it, I don’t want it anymore, and nothing the mother told him could change the boy’s mind. And then the cone ended up on the linoleum floor of the diner and the mother apologized to the waitress, who scooped it up with a napkin. You love it, but it’s tainted.
Her memories seemed to unwrap in layers lately. There were noises she couldn’t place and she wondered if her ears would be able to distinguish the sounds with time or if her mind would continue to stack bricks of paranoia that seemed to mount in her head with every passing day. Every snap of a twig was a predator, every slamming door the dropping of a gun on the forest floor, a never-ending message to her body to brace herself for what was to come. But there was more. How she smelled semen and sweat and deer urine, a scent as strong as it was on that July morning. Most of it she swiped away like a bothersome swarm of gnats circling her, but certain moments remained like a sticky residue that just wouldn’t come clean. How Pimples made her admire him, how Bony Fingers made her say she liked what he was doing to her, how Beard made her beg for him to penetrate her, over and over. Beg. She had to repeat the exact words and when she got them wrong, even just one word, he’d slap her. Hurt her. The thought of it all made her gag, her insides attempting to purge the words he had made her say.
Each one of those insights was a thing in itself, another finger digging into her wounds. If her attempt to not dwell on the past also meant that she didn’t look to the future, what did it matter that she told him she might be pregnant, what did it matter if she handed out a little hope for Nolan and for herself?
“Maybe we should think about buying a crib,” Quinn said then, smiling her most brilliant smile. And when Nolan took her hand and embraced her, she felt almost normal. Almost, but not quite.
Thirteen
DAHLIA
I slide my mother’s purse over the kitchen counter. Her eyelids droop, seem to be made of lead. She nods, faintly, but it’s a nod.
“Thank you,” she says, and even those two little words are dangerously close to being slurred.
“How many of those pills have you been taking?”
She mumbles something like Nonyopism.
“How many?” I repeat and steady her as she gets up and sways.
“None of your business.”
With her purse in hand, she makes her way toward the stairs, holding on to the kitchen counter before she stiffly grabs the handrail. She passes my wall of the missing, yet she neither beholds it nor says anything about it. Instead, she climbs the stairs as if her legs are cast in concrete.
She looks like an actress from the Golden Age, I think, and a definition pops into my head. I remember the cumbersome encyclopedia edition, can almost feel its weight on my lap, its dank scent, the onionskin pages, the gilded edges of those pages between my fingertips. Something in my head flaps its wings, opens its beak, and I hear a faint melody. And just like a
cuckoo bird emerging from its enclosure, a definition reveals itself.
Tightrope walking; the art of walking along a thin wire or rope at a great height. A tightrope artist usually performs in front of an audience.
I watch her reach the upstairs landing. She’s swaying slightly, losing her balance, figuratively and literally, yet she manages to hold on. She drags herself the length of the hallway with her head up, arms out and flexible, keeping her weight on the balls of her feet, her hand gliding along the railing. Her legs are slightly bent. That’s my mother. Performing.
Later, in my room, after tossing and turning for most of the night, I get up and go downstairs. On the laptop I do a search for Aurora, woods, found, Jane Doe, unidentified. By now, several forums are speculating about my Jane. There is someone by the screen name of MommyDearest laying out the case for human trafficking in the Rio Grande Valley. I-35, according to her, is a major artery, yes, she’s using the word artery, in the trafficking trade. IamFiftyOne begs to differ; aliens are involved. The pyramids are proof. PsychStudent is convinced that Jane is mentally ill and will remain unidentified, withering away in some psych ward. NoLongerAVictim is convinced Jane has escaped decades of a life in a closet eating paint chips, “nothing but paint chips her entire life,” which have poisoned her brain, making her incapable of remembering her name.
I no longer know what to make of any of this; the farm, my mother, Jane Doe, Composite Woman. I worry I will never make sense of anything.
I wait until the sun comes up and I call Bobby. “Meet me,” I say.
“Where?” he asks.
“Gas station, at ten,” I say.
Later, for the first time since I returned to Aurora, I see him without his uniform. He wears jeans and boots and drives a pickup truck. He pulls into the parking lot of the gas station where we had waved at each other weeks ago, his hair still wet as if he’s just climbed out of the shower. We embrace and there’s a moment of awkwardness when we let go of each other and we stand close.
There it is, the way he cocks his head ever so slightly—I can tell he sees me in a romantic way. There wasn’t a person in high school who believed we were just friends, but we were, always have been. Friend zone is the expression people use now—back then we didn’t have words for it. And maybe we both didn’t have an explanation either; we just never went there. There was some invisible wall around the both of us that was going to deliver the equivalent of a lightning strike if we had come any closer.
The hug was a simple gesture—an old friend wrapping his arms around me—but I felt something. Is it affection? Something small, maybe the fragile remains of what we used to be? The truth is that our bodies being so close to each other soothes me more than I’d have expected.
We remain casual for a few minutes—how are you, how’s life, this town has hardly changed, how long has it been—that sort of thing. Then we get more personal. He had married—his eyes stoic as he tells the story—and divorced three years later. She was a Realtor wanting to move to Dallas, while Bobby never thought about leaving Aurora. “The marriage was a big mistake,” he adds. He’s done talking about her and I don’t even ask her name.
I tell him about Amarillo, all the jobs I had, not being able to get ahead, and about my mother’s secretive behavior, her reluctance to talk about the past. I used to be covert when we were kids, kept the secrets my mother told me to keep. I wish I hadn’t. To explain to him now what those years were like for me is difficult. When I tell him how it felt being without power, without choices all these years, I see the boy I remember; the raised eyebrow as he’s listening, the kind eyes. A suspended moment of childhood and the long-overdue truth all at once. We let our eyes roam as we sit in the bed of his truck, and we remain silent for a long time. It’s not an awkward moment of silence at all. I can smell the pines, see the boughs sway in the wind, and know their rough dark bark and the stickiness of the dripped resin where woodpeckers have jabbed away at the trees. I hear, even from this parking lot across the street, squirrels running up and down the tree trunks, and I know how it feels to stumble over their snapped branches on the ground.
“So what’s the plan? You staying in town?”
“For now. My mother isn’t doing well and I might have to if I want to or not. I’m looking for a job.”
“Anything going on with her? What did the doctor say?”
“Old age, you know how that goes.”
Sitting here with him feels as if I have never left, as if I walked over a threshold and whatever prior life I lived has somehow taken on the form of a dream. This town has this power over me, had it when I arrived when I was twelve, as if it somehow makes me forget what came before once I pass the Welcome to Aurora sign.
There are new buildings, and roads that have been redone, trees that were mere saplings a decade ago are now mature—the town has changed visually, but I can still see the past, feel it. I am somehow tuned in to this town, know every square inch of it, know its secrets as well as what it allows all of us to see. This is my hometown and it has remained with me while I was gone, but being here with Bobby, it’s like the air carries me still, and the wind is saturated with the voices of people I used to know.
I take a deep breath and catch a whiff of something pungent. Not now, I think and I panic for a second, expecting another episode, but then I see the cedar trees across the street, mixed in with the pines. From them comes this pungent and spicy scent, sharp and intense, not as sweet as the pine trees, more of an intrusion.
I have a million questions but this one is as good as any.
“Do you remember the day we met?” I ask.
“Of course. You came into town in that old beat-up car all the way from the West Coast and your headlight was out and my dad stopped you. I was in the back of the cruiser because it was just another one of those days, you know . . . my mother wasn’t feeling well, and I went to work with him a lot during that time.”
“What else do you remember?”
“You had wild hair and a huge heavy encyclopedia you carried everywhere and I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.”
I was not yet a teenager, barely becoming one. We arrived after a long drive from California, stopping on the way, sometimes for days at a time. Was it a trip, a move?—I don’t remember. I had given up asking Where are we going, what’s next? A kite comes to mind—not like a paper kite batted around by random whips of wind, no, but an untethered kite, floating out there, flying off into the darkness, held by some invisible hand. I didn’t know where we were going to end up, every single time. Were we going to stay in the car for a few days, a small room above a gas station, a motel, a trailer, an apartment with stained carpets and dirty walls? It never got better, that I knew. Until we arrived in Aurora.
I’m glad Bobby remembers that weighty encyclopedia, and I recall many of the definitions from that old dusty book. Heavy and cumbersome as it was, it was my salvation. Whenever I couldn’t make sense of the world, I looked up words and things came into focus. And as the years went by, memories were born out of the words that I longed to understand.
Aurora—it pops into my mind—a natural electrical phenomenon characterized by reddish or greenish streamers of light in the sky. Or dawn.
“Aurora,” I say and put my hand on top of his, “means dawn in Latin.”
“Not sure if it’s fitting for this town but I believe it if you say so,” Bobby says and steps off into a patch of green, aimlessly ripping some of the dirty yellow grasses. Then he tosses them aside carelessly. From the shadow on his face a form develops.
I know Bobby by the way I feel around him, and when his features get dark and gloomy, I want to ask him what is on his mind. About his mother and cancer. About the way it was after she died. I never did. It always seemed as if I’d hurt him more by asking him to say things out loud, and underneath his composure Bobby is paper-thin. A bleeding hea
rt really gets you nowhere, he used to say.
“Did you ever think that, back then, your dad and my mother had . . . you know . . . a thing?” I say it casually, as if I’m not really implying anything. There’s a long silence.
“I don’t think so. Not back then, no. He loved my mother and was heartbroken when she passed away. But . . .” He then looks at me with his eyebrows raised, straight into my eyes. “I think they knew each other. I can’t tell you how I know, it’s nothing that I ever overheard or was told, nothing like that. Just a hunch. Some things you just know.”
I have never considered that possibility. We had lived in California for a long time and when we came back to Aurora, my mother knew no one. Not that she knows anyone now, she’s not the kind who makes a lot of friends, but she knew Sheriff de la Vega and I never believed the story about the broken headlight, even though she still insists on it being true, to this day.
“You believe they knew each other back then, like when?” I finally ask. “Must have been before we met or even before we were born. I was young, but I remember states and names. We’d never been to Aurora before.”
“I don’t know, Dahlia, but I know there was talk in my family, about my father leaving Texas as a teenager, going to Mexico. Nothing more was mentioned, and I never asked. Sometimes an aunt would slip and hint at something. Maybe something that happened a long time ago, before he became sheriff. He was from Nacogdoches, by the Louisiana border, but lived in Beaumont for a while.” He pauses and thinks, sipping beer. “Where’s your mother from?”
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